How do we understand the behavior of other people? Rather than focusing on a person’s traits (or their disposition) as we did in personality psychology, we’ll now include a focus on the situation the person is in. We’ll begin with Attribution Theory, which refers to how we understand the cause of events. So if I watch a person walking down the street and that person suddenly trips and falls down, how might I explain this occurrence?
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) refers to a tendency to attribute the causes of behavior to disposition rather than situation. This means I’m likely to conclude that the person fell because she is clumsy, rather than concluding that a cracked sidewalk was to blame. Similarly, I may conclude that a student hasn’t turned in homework because he’s lazy, rather than thinking that situational factors outside of his control were the cause.
The FAE was demonstrated in a study by Lee Ross, Teresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz which involved a quiz game. In the study, participants observed two others play; one person was the quizmaster and the other was the contestant, and these roles were chosen at random. The quizmaster’s job was to think of random trivia questions that the contestant would be unable to answer correctly.
Rather than recognizing that the random assignment of roles and the nature of the task caused one person to appear more knowledgeable than the other, participants concluded that the quizmasters were actually more intelligent than the contestants. Even when we have clear information that should protect us from making the Fundamental Attribution Error, it still has a tendency to occur.
It’s not just about seeing game show hosts as more knowledgeable (you think you’re pretty smart, don’t you Trebek?) this same effect occurs for actors and their roles, explaining why people might feel uneasy meeting Robert Englund or why Leonard Nimoy titled his first autobiography I Am Not Spock. Although we rationally know that actors are not the roles they play, we still have a tendency to fall into this trap, perhaps thinking that they portray a role so well because they are indeed similar to the character.
This post is an excerpt from Master Introductory Psychology: Complete Edition
